Personal Development with Gray Miller

Posts Tagged ‘practice’

This morning, in the midst of grumping about a lot of things that really didn’t need grumping about, my phone was brightened by a photo from a reader of this blog. The title of the photo was “Gray-induced Micro-Changes” and it looked like this: Confused? I was. She quickly explained: “First visible parking spot. Even […]

Like many other writers in the personal development field, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Gretchen Rubin’s new book Better Than Before. In fact, purchasing it was basically tax-deductible for me; I write every Monday about practices and habits, so a book all about how they’re formed would be essential to my work…right? Even better, I recently had […]

I was having a fascinating discussion with a neuropsychologist, an nurse anesthetist, and a GrandMaster competitive pistol marksman (I know, sounds like the start of a joke, right?) about the differences between good and bad educators. In all of our fields we had consistently seen the phenomenon of the person who was a great “doer” […]

The Hypothesis: As I’ve mentioned a while back, 2015 is a year where my over-arching focus is intended to be a complete abandoning of any “time-management” techniques. That is to say: I don’t want to manage my time, I want to master it. Managing is something you do with what you’re given; mastery is what you […]

One of the ways to change your habits – whether to remove or add them – is to trick yourself into doing it by connecting it to some other abstract ritual. It feeds into our natural human tendency for pattern recognition – for example, the famous self-help guru Jerry Seinfeld recommends “chaining”, which is simply to […]

It was a rough weekend. I was presenting at a conference in Rhode Island, and from the beginning – actually, from before the beginning – things just weren’t going right. I won’t go into the details of all what was wrong…but things were just off. Not in terms of individuals – everyone I met with personally, working for […]

I don’t normally use clickbait-type headlines, but I recently came across some gold content buried deep in a great article in Business Insider. I know, you already visit B.I. for all your relationship needs, but in this case the article was long and in-depth and there’s no way most people would have read down to the part that […]

This entry is being written from a hospital bed, so I’m not going to make it very long. It’s a minor procedure, just a little hernia repair, but it is a different situation. I don’t usually spend a lot of time in hospitals, at least not as a patient. It means I’m outside my comfort […]

Last Monday I let an opportunity slip through my fingers. I had a chance to visit the Dogen Sangha Los Angeles meditation evening which is led by Brad Warner. I’ve been reading and learning from Brad’s books and columns for well over a decade now, and this would have been a chance to meet him in […]

As my experience of the Five-Minute Journal enters its third week, some of the gloss has worn off – though I think that’s more because I’ve become acclimatized to the improvements it made in my life. In other words it now feels normal to be thankful for three things as soon as I get up (and […]